Top 10 Best Universities in the World

If you could attend any university in the world, which one would it be?

Okay, now that you’ve listed the ones located in towns with more bars than street corners, which ones would give you the best education? These schools may be a long way from where you live, but their education is worth the trip.

American schools dominate the list, proving that the U.S. still has the best universities in the world.

10. University of Chicago – Chicago, Illinois

The University of Chicago has graduated numerous Rhodes Scholars and 85 Nobel Prize laureates through its devotion to academic scholarship and intellectualism. The school spent over $400 million in scientific research in 2008 and houses the largest university press in the U.S.

9. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Always near the top in any category, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher learning in the U.S., has the second-largest endowment and the second-largest academic library in the world. Alumni of this Ivy League school include five U.S. Presidents and 19 Supreme Court Justices.

8. Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

One of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution, Princeton focuses on the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. Noted graduates include U.S. Presidents James Madison and Woodrow Wilson and First Lady Michelle Obama.

7. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California

Commonly known as Caltech, The California Institute of Technology is a small school (950 undergraduate and 1200 graduate student) emphasizing science and engineering. Its alumni have won 17 Nobel Prizes and six Turing Awards, the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science.” Graduates include astronauts, astronomers and founder of numerous high tech companies.

6. University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley is considered to be the flagship of the University of California system, with alumni, faculty and researchers winning 66 Nobel Prizes, 20 Academy Awards, and 11 Pulitzer Prizes. Berkeley Lab has discovered 16 chemical elements, more than any other university in the world, and Berkeley student-athletes have won over 100 Olympic medals.

5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Better known as MIT, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a world leader in scientific and technological education and research. A survey of MIT found they had started over 25,000 companies, including Intel, Texas Instruments, Genentech and Campbell Soup. Noted alumni include Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke.

4. Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

Stanford University is a top research university in computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences. The school helped build Silicon Valley into the nation’s high tech mecca with graduates and faculty founding and supporting companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Google. The Sun in Sun Microsystems originally stood for “Stanford University Network.”

3. The University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England

The University of Cambridge is the second-oldest university in both England and the English-speaking world, and the seventh-oldest in the world. Founded by a group of scholars in 1209, the stories of Cambridge graduates could fill many history books, from Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin to C. S. Lewis, Stephen Hawking and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Graduates of Cambridge have won a total of 61 Nobel Prizes, the most of any university in the world, and 52 Nobel Prizes, the second-most.

2. The University of Oxford, Oxford, England

The University of Oxford, founded sometime in the 11th century, is the second oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. As the home of the Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford attracts graduate students from around the world. Alumni include twenty-six British prime ministers, twenty Archbishops of Canterbury and at least twelve saints.

1. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Consistently ranked at or near the top of prestigious universities in most surveys, Harvard University is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country. Eight U.S. Presidents have graduated from Harvard and sixty-two living billionaires, the most in the country. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world – $27.4 billion as of September 2010 – and its faculty and staff have received 38 Nobel Prizes.